Rhea was starting to dislike that smile a lot. It was the smile of a man who found nothing funny and everything amusing.

I was in a bit of a reading funk. Real-world obligations made me tired. It was just easy to come home, turn on the tv, and fade into a nice vegetative state. I TRIED to read, here-and-there, but I just couldn’t get into anything. I couldn’t get past the first page or two of any book that I picked up. Then I tried The Seventh Bride by Ursula Vernon (she uses the pen name T. Kingfisher for her more adult-y books), and my reading block was cured. You should read it.

I’ve recently read the 2014 book Nigerians in Spaceby Deji Bryce Olukotun, and I’ve come out the other side baffled and unsettled. I don’t understand why this book has received the praise it’s gotten. While the core premise around which Olukotun builds his narrative may be promising, that premise is hardly explored and is almost entirely obscured by unrelatable and unlikable characters and bad writing.

I don’t think there’s a lot of value in delving more deeply into the “bad writing” claim. I think it’s poorly written, and I encourage potential readers to seek out an excerpt (for a spoiler-free excerpt, readers may look to the chapter on the character named Thursday, around page 53). From there, they’ll easily see whether the writing style will turn them off or not.

I do think there’s value in looking at what I mean when I say characters are unlikable (since it is my main complaint), and also in acknowledging what I do think is laudable about this book.

When it comes to unlikable characters, Olukotun has done something incredible. I did not encounter a single character I found relatable in any way, or indeed encounter any characters written in such a way that the audience was even supposed to like them. They are uniformly without personality, not just in a dry sense but in their almost frantic lack of relatable motivation or worldview. This alone might be chalked up to where I stand on the topic of “show don’t tell”, but a lack of personality is not where this character issue ends.

This book is astonishingly anti-woman. Wale’s wife, for instance, remains nothing more than an essentially mute and sullen harpy, a foil for Wale’s drama to play against. Another character, when encountering the girlfriend of his partner-in-crime, says

“Fadanaz’s breasts pushed out when she was angry, and their presence made it hard for him to register her words.”

And the whole book reads like this. I can’t take a book with lines like this seriously, and I genuinely don’t think anyone should.

However, if I can’t talk you out of reading this book, I’d like to suggest a way to look past its significant problems. Read Nigerians in Space with an eye to the future: to the hope and potential living within Olukotun’s promising premise, and to how prophetic this book has already turned out to be.

In a Slate article, Olukotun describes an understandably (yet almost unimaginably) surreal experience. In a trip to Nigeria, years after writing Nigerians in Space, Olukotun visited Nigeria and the African University of Science and Technology and met Dr. Olufemi Agboola, the director of engineering and space systems at the National Space Research and Development Agency. He says

“There was something absolutely terrifying about meeting in real life a person whom I thought I made up. .. Before me sat an individual with agency and flaws and nuance. I was nearly silenced by the absurdity of our encounter. Since the program was founded in 2003, Agboola’s agency has launched five satellites into space.”

Dr. Agboola, it turns out, really is remarkably like Wale from his book – only real.

If you read Nigerians in Space, remember this part. It’s easy to see that both Olukotun’s book and the reality of scientific advances in Nigeria came from the same kernel of ambition that inspired Olukotun’s writing way back when. You might marvel at how beautiful it is that a man could be inspired to write this story, whose hopeful scifi future turns out not to be future at all – but Nigeria’s real present-day, full of the accomplishments and the ambition that Okulotun (and scientists like Dr. Agboola) dared to dream.

If you are a scientist you believe that it is good to find out how the world works; that it is good to find out what the realities are; that it is good to turn over to mankind at large the greatest possible power to control the world and to deal with it according to its lights and its values.

Sleeping Giants by Sylvain Neuvel is a kinda-YA book about scientists discovering and then figuring out an ancient giant alien robot. It is the first book of a series (The Themis Files series). My reviews this year have mostly been all-out endorsement (Pachinko and Purple and Black) or a kind of resigned acceptance of well-meaning mediocrity (Beneath the Sugar Sky). My feelings for Sleeping Giants are more complex. On the one hand, I like how the book is about figuring out an ancient giant alien robot. On the other hand, that’s pretty much the only thing I liked about it.

The Philip K. Dick award will be announced March 30, 2018, in Seattle, WA. The award is presented annually to a distinguished work of science fiction originally published in paperback form in the United States. This post is the first in a series of reviews of the nominees for this year’s Philip K. Dick awards. The other nominees are The Book of Etta by Meg Elison, After the Flare by Deji Bryce Olukotun, The Wrong Stars by Tim Pratt, Revenger by Alastair Reynolds, Bannerless by Carrie Vaughn, and All Systems Red by Martha Wells.

“All right, who did you become?” Maria asked as her door closed behind her with a whooshzz. She faced her rooms. It was an odd, ghostly feeling, missing so many years. She saw signs of herself everywhere, but someone who was a different person than she was now. She found herself mourning the dead woman, the Maria who would be remembered by no one.

It is clear beyond a shadow of a doubt why Mur Lafferty won the 2013 John W. Campbell award. This woman can write!

“Roxy feels the thing like pins and needles along her arms. Like needle-pricks of light from her spine to her collarbone, from her throat to her elbows, wrists, to the pads of her fingers. She’s glittering, inside.”

“Margot waits to see Jos do something; hold her breath, or wrinkle her brow, or show exertion in the muscles of her arm, but there’s nothing. Only the pain.”

The Power by Naomi Alderman is one of those books that people are going to be talking about and analyzing decades from now. As I read, I was struck almost immediately by how clearly, how perfectly, The Power fit into a very short list of culturally relevant, beautifully written, “social criticism as dystopian fiction” works. This is this decade’s answer to The Handmaid’s Tale and Never Let Me Go, and carries as much meaning, as much depth of social awareness, as much horror, and as much lovingly created characters as Atwood’s and Ishiguro’s genre-defining works.

I have to admit, the books that are being released this February don’t excite me very much. Last February, I got spoiled by the release of Neil Gaiman’s Norse Mythology, George Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo, Nichlas Eames’ Kings of the Wyld, Angie Thomas’ The Hate U Give, and Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko. There just doesn’t seem to be anything in this batch that is equal to any of those.

Nevertheless, there are a few books that caught my eye that I’ll be adding to my aspirational TBR stack.

You are, of course, an unmitigated bastard. Not content with dragging me away from my chair at Anassus, which I worked bloody hard to earn and which will now go to that pinhead Atho, you made me waste three months of my life in a military academy, of all places, and now you’ve dumped me here, in the last place on earth, surrounded by snow, soldiers and savages. What the hell did I ever do to you?

Purple and Black by KJ Parker is a fantasy novella. My first experience with KJ Parker’s writing was The Best Man Wins, a novelette contained in The Book of Swords. I was impressed with that story’s morally ambiguous characters, humor, and Deep Thoughts about justice, morality, and revenge. A week or so later, I saw a review by Fantasy Literature for Purple and Black, an older novella by KJ Parker. Intrigued, I ordered a copy from Amazon.

A new, young emperor has seized control of the Empire. He has appointed his old college buddy as an important governor in the north. The title Purple and Black refers to colors of ink. Purple ink is used for Official Imperial messages that can only be used by authorized Imperial Officials. The official correspondence is usually paired with unofficial private letters written in black ink. And so, Purple and Black is composed of the official letters (written in purple ink) and the unofficial letters (written in black ink) between the Emperor and his old college buddy/governor.

There is a lot of material packed within the 100-ish pages of this book. The two old friends share their reflections on battles and war, youthful idealism, the concepts of good and evil, the moral benefits of an imperial system versus “anarchy,” and the philosophical foundation of using violent force to accomplish benevolent aims. It’s a realistic book, with more-or-less accurate portrayals of economics and the power dynamics of a monarchy (and the instability of such a system). If that sounds dry and boring, it’s not. The Emperor and the Governor are charming, urbane, witty people doing the best they can while telling jokes and reminiscing about their college days. They feel like real people.

I’d recommend this book to fans of fantasy, political science, history, and philosophy.

Grave robbing was still viewed as socially inappropriate, and doing it when the sun was up was generally viewed as unwise.

Beneath the Sugar Sky by Seanan McGuire is a sequel to Every Heart a Doorway, the 2017 Hugo and Nebula award-winner for best novella (shorter book). This book series is portal fantasy: those stories where a kid finds a doorway to another world, goes through it, and saves that world while figuring out something important about herself. Every Heart criticized, expanded upon, commented upon, and examined the tropes of the portal fantasy genre, all while telling a fun, entertaining story. Beneath the Sugar Sky picks up where Every Heart left off.

Beneath the Sugar Sky is in the same style as its predecessor, so there are more teenagers that don’t feel at home here on Earth, more discussions about portal worlds, and another charming quest.

Barbary Station appeared on a lot of best-of lists, and rightfully so. But if you’d asked me what I thought about it in the first hundred (or so) pages, I would’ve had a very different take.

It took me until page 120 or so to figure out why I was having such a hard time getting into Barbary Station. By rights, this book is so up my alley I should have been able to walk right into its pages like I’d been born there. It wasn’t the setting, nor was it the characters, nor the premise. It wasn’t the author’s voice, the pacing, or anything like that. Still, somehow I just couldn’t catch the flow of Stearns’ book.

Finally, I put my finger on it: the central political conflict that motivates much of the incidental inter-character conflict was lost on me. It wasn’t complicated or anything, it’s just that the way Stearns presented it it went in one ear and out the other (so to speak). I’m sure it’s not her fault – I just missed it, and was left with that arresting moment of “wait, what?” every time a new interaction went south because of that conflict.

Thankfully, once I was able to put my finger on what was tripping me up I fared a lot better, and almost immediately got into the swing of this book. It didn’t hurt that, coincidentally, right as I recovered from my revelation the whole AI plot (totally what I’d showed up for in the first place) picked up in earnest. From then on, there was no hope for me. I was in love!

I can’t find anything on Stearns’ background in AI, but I just can’t believe she hasn’t got one. AI development is one of my passions, and most of my life (and my college career) has been spent plumbing its depths and keeping abreast of the latest theories and developments. Stearns’ view of how real artificial intelligence would be integrated into a future society blew me away. Her vision for the future is brilliant (and perfectly credible), and her handling of the moral implications of true AI is the perfect blend of approachable and cutting-edge; it’s truly inspiring without ever trending preachy or overly “science”y.

In addition, Stearns has presented literally the only version of the “person entering a virtual realization of the concept-space a computer operates within” trope that didn’t make me roll my eyes – since Tron. Since that sentence is a nightmare, let me explain as well as I can without spoilers. Adda, the computer engineer protagonist, has a specialized jack implant with which she “jacks in” to computers in order to interact with their AIs. When she does this, she enters a hallucinographic environment that abstracts computer data into (sometimes odd) real-world items for her to interact with. This trope has been used over and over again, since Tron and the Matrix, Hackers and Andromeda. And visually, it kind of works. But when it’s used in writing, it’s always fallen flat for me. Stearns, however, uses this technique in a way that adds to, rather than distracts from, her narrative. Suffice it to say I’m very impressed.

To round it out, she writes amazing characters! The protagonist couple are wonderfully and stably in love, without going grossly “lovey”, and they’re each believably real as individual characters and as partners for each other. As a bonus for some of us readers, Stearns’ writing is body-inclusive and one of her main characters is a total introvert – and not just when it’s convenient to the story! Stearns displays a real knack for a very particular kind of humor, too, and I am HERE for it.

Which brings me to my last observation for this spoiler-free review: this book would make an AMAZING movie! So many of the plot-advancing reveals are visual, and while Stearns writes them exceedingly well they would be astounding on the large screen. Everything about this book would pop on screen – from the epic scenes, to the breathtaking action, to the nail-biting suspense, and beyond. I’ve never actually *wished* for a movie adaptation like this before. And with the reception it’s gotten since it was published, I think chances are good Barbary Station might just make it to a theater near you (and me).

[I am battling a cold/sinus thing, so apologies if this review makes even less sense than usual].

Pachinko by Min Jin Lee is a family saga about a four generations of a Korean family that is set in Korea and Japan. It’s a National Book Award finalist, and, in what may be an even greater honor than that, it made my Favorite Books list.

I have found that it is easier to explain why I don’t like a particular book or to point out a book’s flaws than it is to explain why I absolutely loved one. It’s like explaining why a rainbow is beautiful. I can talk about how the colors are pretty or how it made me feel, but there is something about rainbows, sunsets, and the best works of art that transcends easy explanation. You just have to experience them. Read Pachinko.